


Phryne Misses a Murder

by strangerthanfic



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Banter, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flirting, Penis In Vagina Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 08:48:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23348713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangerthanfic/pseuds/strangerthanfic
Summary: Jack interrupts one of Phryne's rare quiet rainy days to demand to know why she didn't show up to interrupt his investigation. Realizations ensue.
Relationships: Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson
Comments: 21
Kudos: 220





	Phryne Misses a Murder

Now--there were knocks on the door, and then there was THIS knock at Phryne’s door. 

The pitter-pounder of knuckles on brass startled Phryne almost right off her vanity tuffet. For heaven’s sake, even the suds in her cooling bathtub rippled in response to the racket! Usually, she’d finish dabbing the kohl around her eyes and make whoever it was wait for perfection--but having already given Dot and Mr. Butler the night off, she hadn’t the choice.

Slipping into the nearest example of her collection of silken robes, she flew downstairs to rescue her door from certain destruction. As she neared it, she recognized that strident rhythm—Detective Inspector Jack Robinson calling, on a mission and hell-bent!

She greeted him in a breathless ruffle, already smiling. “Adventure calls? And all the sweeter when Jack Robinson comes bearing her summons!”

As if she hadn’t spoken, Jack demanded, “Just where the hell have you been?”

The full-baritone heat of his tone took Phryne aback. Now that she looked, his hat sat askew on his rain-damp hair, which was itself ruffled beyond respectability—the effect was very nearly rakish.

Pursing her lips and raising her brows, she retorted, “Would you like me to tell you that I was ensconced safely at home for a quiet, rainy afternoon?” 

Well, that was the truth—but Jack didn’t need to know that.

He squinted at her, nostrils bull-flaring like they used to the first few times she’d “breached” his crime scene. (The first few times she’d *arrived fortuitously to provide vital assistance,* thank you!)

She always did like his eyes. And how interesting that the full glint of them seemed not only unfazed by the bare shoulders peeking from her hastily-cinched dressing gown, but attentive to it!

Then he seemed to reach some abrupt conclusion, demanding, “How did you know?!”

…Alright, then. Even the sharpest sleuth could sometimes find herself at a loss. She stepped back to gesture him off her soggy doorstep. “Why don’t you come in and tell me, exactly, what it is I was so marvelously perspicacious about this time?”

Entering the foyer, he asked, “How did you know it was an accident?” Curious admiration lit those so-very-likable eyes, which then turned skywards to resume an old rant. “Ye gods, can I never plug all the leaks in the damned Victorian police force?!”

“Jack, I hate to admit it so early into a conversation, but… You’ve lost me. What accident?” 

Honestly, even on Dot and Mr. Butler’s day off, she was perfectly capable of responding to her telephone’s bell—and it hadn’t rung once! Whatever could have happened? And honestly, why *didn’t* she know about it, if it had Jack in such a lather?

“The murder,” he said, then corrected himself, “The death. You knew it was an accident all along, didn’t you, and that’s why you didn’t bother to get involved.”

As he seemed insistent on being nonsensical, Phryne decided to start with her most pressing worry. “Is everyone quite alright, Jack?”

He hurried to reassure her. “Yes, fine, everyone is fine. No, the issue is you! Were the circumstances of the act not strange enough to catch your interest, then? Or are you ill? Or …You … didn’t know at all.” Quicksilver, his harried expression ranged to sheepishness, then riled disdain, then open concern--and finally all the way to dull shock. If he kept on this way, she’d be forced to kiss him just to snap him back to reality.

Folding her arms, she said, “Much as I enjoy the occult airs others ascribe to me, I am not actually a medium, Inspector Robinson. The aether doesn’t vibrate to let me know whenever a death has occurred in the vicinity!”

Jack propped his fists on his hips and formed slow words. “So…There is no leak. Of information. In the precinct.”

“Shipshape, on this particular occasion,” said Phryne.

“So—I’ve just solved a suspected homicide, alone, in under six hours because it was… uninteresting?” he hazarded, exasperation leaking into his voice.

“Not at all, Jack, I’m sure the time-frame was a testament to your skills and not a measure of the complexities of the case,” she said, admittedly with very little idea of what was going on—but with staunch faith in Jack’s reliability.

Stubble rasped as he rubbed his mouth. He rambled, “If it had been interesting, I assume you would have turned up.”

There seemed to be some sort of flaw in his logic today--but without Mac around, who could tell which particular fallacy Jack had fallen prey to? Well, if he insisted on seeing her as a wily spirit capable of such things, that was his lookout! She shrugged. “Six hours, you said? Hats off to the Victorian constabulary!”

Energy returned to his gaze, and he took a few steps towards her. True to form, she did not back away as he continued, “Which brings me right back where I started—where the hell were you?!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! …I took a rather long bath.”

Looming, he gave her an exasperated glare.

“Honest,” she said. When he merely blinked at her, she waggled her fingers under his nose as proof. “You see? Fingertips like corduroy. Your fondest wish is granted, Jack—I was boringly safe at home.”

Out of contrary principle, he retorted absently, “That isn’t my fondest wish.” 

Before she could investigate that interesting slip of the tongue, he announced, “Miss Fisher, I have just become aware of several things simultaneously. One: I would sooner ascribe to you superhuman feats of the mind than throw my lot in with the more obvious shave of Occam’s Razor, and—Are you certain you’re not ill?”

“Fit as a fiddle! Jack, honestly, you’re starting to worry me. What’s realization number two?”

“That I may have finally done my job of sealing off bothersome civilians from police business a shade too well. Because, three: I find myself in the awkward position of having missed you all day.”

His voice dipped to subterranean tremors by the end of his admission.

“Oh,” she said. The air seemed suddenly too light for breath, so she forced herself to follow-up with a teasing smile. “Only that? You needn’t sound so mystified. I’m eminently missable.”

He stepped even closer. “Missed you and worried myself sick about you in turns, like a bloody saloon door stuck to the spot and spinning,” he growled. “You weren’t THERE.”

My, he was tall. When he turned all intense like this, he seemed taller than any man she’d ever known, while at the same time making her feel taller, too. Straddling the world with him, a couple of titans with gazes locked.

She really did like those eyes of his. Very much. Especially when they stared at her.

“Jack,” she began.

He stole the heated air from the word and turned it right back on her. “Which brings me to four: Whatever goddess-like aspects I may have rightly or falsely assigned to you, you are actually just a… Well, you aren’t ‘just’ anything, Miss Fisher. But you are a woman.”

Finally—yes, please—he was gazing at her like he was going to do something about that, cut through all the obstacles he’d set between them and embrace the basics; the fundamental certainty between them that was all flesh and blood and no excuses. She’d never get enough of their particular meeting of the minds, but the rest of her was going mad with craving more; please, please let this be the day she got to release her slippery fingertips from that bothersome good sense!

“And what a woman you are,” he added.

She couldn’t tell if she said his name aloud, or if it simply rung in her like a starting bell.

She bit her lower lip. He brushed a thumb across it. Her breath caught. 

With the hum of a man sinking into a warm bath, he murmured, “Your lips are bare.”

Very little in her life had left her feeling quite so naked as him pointing that out. Her bare lips parted, her neck tipping beneath his touch. 

They’d been here before, many times. Her eyes on him, game and expectant—his eyes on hers, shrewd but charmed. Only a breath away.

Just when he’d normally retreat into reserve, he continued, softly, “Look at you. I spent all day in the rain detecting that death and the world sometimes have no deeper significance, and certainly no style, when I could have been home with—I could’ve come home to-!” He broke off, but his big, warm fingers tightened briefly where they rested against her cheek, in her hair.

Through the pent desire in his eyes, his amusement at his own expense shone through. And she couldn’t help but love him for it.

Always so reluctant to presume, her Detective Inspector. If only he knew how dearly she’d love to hear him finish that sentence. Craved it, even. As much as he’d craved her company today, it seemed.

Kissing the tip of his thumb, she admitted, “You can always come home to me, Jack. Even if I’m out, I’m sure to return shortly, if you’re there. I think I’d quite like coming home to you.”

“Phryne,” he breathed. Then he kissed her.

Just before their lips met, the flicker of helpless disbelief along his brow looked so like pain that she positively flung herself around him. He had to know she meant it, that she wanted him just as much. He had to. Her silk-winged arms slid tighter around the strong shift of his shoulders as he strove to kiss her mind out of her body. Believe it, believe it, Jack.

Then the internal litany, like the speeding beat of her heart, became simply:

Jack Jack Jack…

Her bare feet whispered on the foyer tile. Cleaner’s foil left forgotten on his cuff buttons scraped a tiny run in the silk over her hip. A letter in his vest pocket crinkled between their ribs. He tasted of biscuits from his hidden stash.

How strange, that for someone whose life until now had included so much opulent intimacy—at least, it had since she’d begun living the life she chose—this quiet, tousled, rainy moment, utterly without artifice or polish could seize her with desire.

Then he cupped her bottom in both hands and swept her up to lock her ankles behind his hips, and the moment wasn’t quiet anymore.

“Ah, Jack,” Phryne whined, knocking his hat off and nibbling the shell of his ear while he bent to mouth at her throat. Silk slithered further down her shoulders under the brush of his chin. “Please, please don’t stop this time!”

With a luxuriating growl, Jack sank against the wall, gripping her tighter. As though he wanted to burrow into her and stay there for weeks.

She wouldn’t complain!

“Only a word from you would stop me, now. Nothing else,” he admitted. Now his hips began to grind against hers, lush and unhurried. He’d waited long enough and intended to savor her. “The house could burn down around us. Locusts. Mr. Butler could shoot me in the leg to protect your honor.”

Hearty laughter startled out of her. The absolutely boyish grin on his flushed face when she finally caught her breath made the ungainly noise utterly worth it.

“No such adventures await us, I promise,” she said, brushing their noses together. Then it was time to investigate his upper lip. Not so stiff as she’d once feared!

He squeezed her arse with an exquisite roughness, saying, “I beg to differ.”

“No such mis-adventures, then,” she tempered, burying her fingers in his hair as he mounted the stairs to her room like a bona fide rogue. Oh say, mister, was that music playing? “Though if it’s adventure you want, I might have to talk you into taking me in the rain, up on the roof.”

The strong neck beneath her teasing mouth flushed bright red. Blond boys and their lovely colors! “You’ll never, ever again have to talk me into taking you,” he rumbled.

Pleased, she bit the tendon in his very conveniently situated neck.

He gasped, then joked, “The ‘up to your roof’ part might take some convincing.” As she grinned, he settled her carefully on her unmade bed. The humidity from her abandoned bath curled his locks beneath her stroking fingers, sheened her skin. His palms skimmed her reclining form like some expert might handle a priceless vase.

For just a moment she was worried he might carry on being TOO careful, but abruptly he bent his golden head and single-mindedly sucked a dark, dark mark directly between her breasts.

She wriggled, finally gasping, “Jack!”

“Mm, I’ve been waiting. To put my mark. Right. There,” he rumbled, admiring his work, then sucking kiss after kiss to that deliciously stinging spot. It made her nipples peak in the chilly silk, and he’d barely started touching her.

That boded extremely well.

He pulled back for a moment, gingerly stroking the love bite he’d left. “I got a little carried away. I’m sorry, I should’ve asked. Not all your gowns will cover this spot.”

Hmm! There was more than a bit of a wild thing beneath his exterior, after all—signing his work and leaving a challenge, if not quite staking his claim. “Would that have made you more or less likely to do it?” she asked.

His busy mouth on her belly didn’t betray a smile, but he stared covetously up at her through his lashes.

So she said, “What if I said I’d still wear those plunging gowns, so someone might see it?” Smack in the center of her pale skin, brazen and dark like a lipstick kiss.

He buried a groan low on her belly, then slipped the tie of her dressing gown free, peeling it open. “No, it’s too much to ask, Phryne…”

One surprise after another! She dug her heels beneath the wings of his shoulder-blades, feeling a little covetous herself. “…Are you asking, Jack?” How exciting—she didn’t even know what her answer would be!

To which he said, equal parts wry and earnest, “I couldn’t have your reputation in tatters. I’ll give you the lend of a suit—button you up tight with a wicked hat and high boots.”

An interesting image! Much like the picture he made now, rearing up to strip off his jacket and tie, starch evaporating in the steamy air. And then the picture he made, holding her eye, bending low between her thighs. She flicked open his cuff buttons, baring his gorgeous forearms with her fingernails as he kissed from her knee to the imprinted ghost of her garter, then further, further…

Stretching like a cat and biting her lip in anticipation, Phryne mused, “I’ll pin a jewel in my lavaliere close along the neckline. No one will suspect what it covers. But throughout the evening, the silver setting would scrape the skin, every time reminding me of this, of you…”

Determined to oblige her and burn his touch into her memory, Jack shamelessly worked his jaw and licked deeply, suddenly into her.

Ooh, that pointed, serpent tongue! That wolf-like laving, devouring. That lion-slow blink of his eyes, finally drunk on the desire that she’d only gotten him to sip, before. Made her heart lift and her eyes glisten to see it. 

“Oh, you’re having FUN, aren’t you?” she gasped.

He chuckled into her and her legs nearly constricted.

She was just so bloody FOND of this man! She wanted him, of course—even loved him—but it was the FONDNESS that still managed to amaze her, tip the familiar speeding of her heart over into a cliff-plunge rush.

“Ooh, Jack…”

He liked her noises—she watched him roll his hips against the edge of the bed for a giddy moment, then tapped her foot playfully against his arse.

“Save that for me!” she mock-protested.

His growl rattled her hipbones to jelly—she squealed—then his fingers dug into her hips and he lazily reversed their position. He wanted her pressing his head into the sheets, nothing above his hungrily twisting hips but air… Denying himself even that small release because she’d asked. Not even asked—she’d joked! Made her wonder, breathing into the second-bottle slink of desire through her veins—what other things had she joked about, that he’d secretly taken in deadly earnest?

“Oh, Jack, yes—what else have you been saving for me?”

An eye-crossing twist of his tongue and an impertinent flick of his nose, apparently! Then he rested his lower teeth just below the head of her clitoris and worried it from above with the underside of his tongue.

Phryne swore as only a Collingwood girl could. Somehow he knew just where her limits were--though that was impossible—if anything was impossible when it came to Jack Robinson—still, she hadn’t expected him to be fumbling but he wasn’t cautious, either. Not cautious at all. She found herself melting forward under—or over, as it were!—the onslaught.

“Jack!” she cried, scandalized. “And you claim you haven’t read my diary!”

Fun as it was to bury her face in her pillows and let him ripple her limp body like a ribbon, she wanted to see him while he unraveled them both. She pushed upright with one hand on her headboard like a woman dragging herself from the brink of death, only to be met with his self-satisfied gaze between her legs.

Slippery, smug, tongue-teasing death. What a way to go.

But she’d just gotten him into her clutches! And she was damn well going to make herself at home.

She stretched for the ceiling like she could feel the raindrops cascading down her skin instead of silk receding as she shed her robe completely.

“I can’t say I’m surprised, love,” she sighed, throaty. She smiled down at him, and he forwent licking her for a moment, rubbing a long thumb between her legs and watching that instead. “I could always tell you’d melt me like a candle. You must’ve known it too, my clever, clever Jack. Took you long enough.”

Then she wrung away the last of Jack’s pomade with a firm grip in his hair, grinning when he groaned and bucked.

She cast a sly glance behind her to his futilely thrusting hips—and his extremely interested cock—then stroked his hair from his forehead.

“We’d better get you out of those wet clothes before you burst a seam,” she purred.

“Hm,” he hummed, considering. “Mm-mm.”

Another lion blink, his hands kneading over her waist and ribs—one to her breast, one to pull down on her shoulder for greater leverage as he sank his tongue back inside her—and then, his eyes SMILED. Sleepy and slow and content to while an age away, buried beneath her giving her pleasure and delaying his own.

What was a girl to do but bark out a disbelieving sound and come until she couldn’t feel her legs? He drank her up with the loudest noises, shocking her blush abruptly to the tips of her breasts.

The leashed brushes of his mouth, as if he were deciding whether or not to bite, made the concept of catching her breath a pipe dream. The repeated touch of his tongue was far too gentle, but she just couldn’t, couldn’t stop him.

Phryne had, now and then, enjoyed a silken rope or two, but nothing ever had or ever would hold her captive so completely as the sight of a pleased Jack Robinson.

Finally, when it became clear he’d be happy to keep doing that indefinitely, she had to wriggle free. “Ah, Jack that tickles!”

Arching a brow, he drawled into her inner thigh, “Oh, I wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“It’s your own fault for overdressing,” she quipped, shimmying down his body to unbutton his shirt. The flush of his skin cast a palpable layer of heat through his clothes, into her bare, still quivering flesh. “Anyway, I’m not saying stop—I’m saying more.”

His hips rose, but she lifted higher on her knees—quite a bit higher, oh my, she couldn’t wait to unwrap that particular present—shoving his shirt down his arms and denying him the friction. For the moment.

“I thought you said more, Phryne,” he rumbled. “And I’ve been listening very closely.”

“More skin,” she purred in the hollow of his throat, nipping at his adams-apple as he swallowed. Thankfully, years of practice meant she could unfasten trousers blind—she didn’t have to tear herself away from the rat-a-tat snare of his pulse just yet. She wanted to dance to that beat, someday. “I’ve waited years to ruffle your feathers, Jack Robinson.”

His lips curled sweetly, fingertips tracing a similar curl along her thigh. “Me too.”

She popped onto her elbows. “Waited for me to ruffle your feathers? Or for you to ruffle mine?”

Pursing his lips at her medallion ceiling—and bending one knee to rub himself into her cupping hand—he treated her query with the utmost consideration. “Both,” he answered finally, tone breezy and voice breathless. “A mutual be-ruffling.”

“And after all that trouble I took looking smart in satin.”

Once more, his fingertips drew along her thigh, up her spine. “I’ll never understand why you deck yourself in silks that can never compare to the texture of your skin.”

She’d never understand how a bone-deep sensualist like him decked himself in anything else. She should smother him in silk and tie him to her bed.

“Because you’d arrest me for public indecency if I didn’t.”

“If you honestly believe those outfits of yours are decent, then—ah!” Jack broke off when she settled herself over him--letting her wetness slide from the base of his cock to the head, trapping him flat beneath her--with a noise like he’d taken a punch to the jaw.

She’d heard the noise often enough to identify it as such, and so felt an unaccountable urge to soothe said jaw with both hands. She did so, because Phryne Fisher was not in the business of denying urges; then she bent to kiss him as reverently as she knew how, for similar reasons.

But before she succumbed entirely to his wiles, she had one last chore to do. She made sure to lock him in her sights as she pulled away—briskly, so as to be back to him sooner.

“What,” he panted, “Get back here, you.”

Scampering across her bed on her knees to her bedside table, she told him, “Now stay right there and let me ogle your perfection. Debauchery suits you, Jack.”

And it did—where he wasn’t tousled and golden he was proud and ruddy, all the long muscles she’d only caught sight of bit by bit before on lazy display.

“How would you know? I’m still half-bauched as yet,” he quipped. Unable to lay as she’d asked for too long, he rolled to drag soft lips and sharp stubble all along her collarbones while she dealt as quickly with contraception as she could.

She fought shivers, giggling, “You’re—mm!—making this rather difficult, you know, darling.”

“It’s my turn to make something difficult for you,” he teased, breath puffing into the crook of her neck.

Then she was ready, and let herself topple them backwards with a swoony, gleeful noise. Before they hit her pillows, they were kissing again, over her shoulder. Without parting the slide of their tongues, she rolled to lie atop him on her belly, and then he rolled her beneath him. It was only natural, then, for her legs to part and for him to roll his hips and slide inside her.

The easy flow of the moment broke with an electric shudder—they both threw their heads back. He hissed wordlessly, and she groaned so deeply her voice was barely her own, “Oh Jack…”

“N-not too fast?” he managed to ask.

They were already moving, the thick slide of him pressing so deliciously along her every weakness, so she could only whimper, “Just right, just right!” 

His arm insinuated underneath her so that his palm cradled the base of her skull, his fingers plunging into her hair, and she cackled with breathless pleasure, “Ye gods, Jack, it’s taken years, Jack, YEARS—don’t you ever dare slow down!”

But slow down he did—of course, the insufferable, wonderful, contrarian man—letting his weight sink into her greedily grasping arms and lifting his head.

Her heart ran riot in her chest, beating a tom-tom all the way down to her belly and toes; it was the same charged gaze they’d always had, but forever different. That powerful promise between them splashed over the brim, finally, and she would chase every drop.

God, she’s told him she’d been home all day—but she wasn’t sure she’d ever been home at all until this very moment. 

The lion’s gaze creased at the corners, and he closed his eyes first. The hand cradling her head kept her close as he rolled onto his back—then he seized her hips, sped his rhythm beneath her to a bumpy road bounce.

Mm, she had to ravish him in the Hispano Suizo! She would have him everywhere and every-way, and a few new ways besides—she would ruin him for anyone else.

“God, I’m sorry, I can’t,” he hissed.

“But darling, you are, you are,” she gasped, sweating and riding him with extraordinarily poor posture.

“I’d wanted to impress you.” (She nibbled whatever part of him was nearest—his fingers, she thought.) “I don’t know.” (His laugh, nigh-hysterical—his hands, so sure.) “I had a thought towards acrobatics. Many, many thoughts, in fact.”

“Later, darling--next,” she whimpered.

But there was something ancient and portentous about the way they acted each simple step in the dance, as if circling back again and again with each thrust to Yes, This, Yes, You.

Fuck, said Jack, and other cries deeper than words.

Phryne often thought she lived for those little instants when her control totally exploded, and then the pleasant aftermath of tidying the scattered pieces; a divine sort of fun, but fun nevertheless. 

After this—she wasn’t sure she could ever rebuild herself. The foundations were shifting. The house would never be the same.

This was more than a moment, for starters. She was aloft and aloft and aloft, endless, moaning minutes, expanding on the cosmic edge and nowhere in her right body, forever approaching orgasm but with no one peak upon which to pin her bedraggled stamina. The body, oh, he made the body sing—but her heart had taken over, and so when he touched he touched her everywhere, could be denied nothing. No place to hide, no coy shoulder to turn.

She’d never felt safer, damn him. (Thank him. Love him.)

Without faltering, he reared sitting, not to kiss her, but just to look at her, just to be nearer to her while she—while they—oh, not yet, not yet!

She blinked into his gorgeous face, his brows contorted but lips so soft, smiling at her, crooked and droll and utterly disarmed.

“Ooh,” she whined, eyes wide, a warning, too near the edge, she’d fall, then, “Oh, yes!”

Just as he pressed inside her perfectly—they were all perfect, every movement, the shape of him and his relentless tender roughness—she slammed back into her own body and came and came and came, clasped around him as he tumbled too.

Who went first, who was pushed? They’d never know, as long as they never let go.

A filmy veil of muscle-melting satiation drifted across the scene. Vaguely, she was aware of the rain surging, ebbing. Rare thunder threatened by the time she’d amassed the wherewithal to marshal her lips into what could be rightfully called a kiss, which she followed by propping her cheek on her hand and just looking at him.

Her voice was shockingly rusty when she said, “I want you to know that you’re not going anywhere…”

“I appreciate that, thank you,” he drawled lightly, moving so little that he implied he was, at least for the moment, incapable.

“And I am thrilled to my toes and beyond that you’re here, finally, and you’re…”

He snagged her free hand, running his teeth along her finger. “Yours. I am. What’s beyond your toes?”

She ignored the joke, just for now. “But I have to ask…What did today do to you, my darling Jack? What happened in the rain that drove you here, at long last?”

He sighed, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I drove myself here, truly—I’d reached the ragged edge of my foolish resistance to you already, you should know.”

Honestly, she didn’t know. She was just heartily glad that his resistance was a country she had finally officially mapped to the coast.

He dragged the nearest fabric over her bare back—his shirt, apparently, as the buttons tickled up her spine. She folded her arm between them, snuggling in. 

“As for today,” he said, then paused. “I don’t enjoy murder, on any level. But at least sometimes, in the uncovering of motives, I can find satisfaction in the riposte. Catching those with the temerity to believe they could avoid being caught. Though it comes too late.”

Phryne knew the feeling. Revenge wasn’t a motivation she bothered berating herself over, but it was different for Jack. She let him think, honestly a little humbled to get to watch, up close, while Jack Robinson thought something out to a conclusion even he didn’t yet understand.

“…All killing is crude,” he said, clearly unsatisfied with how he put it, yet pressing on. “But even crudeness can be done with…substance.”

“As Bert and Cec prove daily!” She made sure to crack the joke with a perfectly solemn face, so he would know she was listening.

There was that helpless smile! “I would think of Mac in her cups, but yes. I don’t know how to put it. I suppose most evil in the world is banal. But an act, a choice behind a cause, at least—when that’s not there, there’s nothing behind anything…It left me feeling so empty.” He rocked his head on the pillow, dismissing the train of thought. “You joked before that you at home, tucked away, was my fondest dream.”

Her heart wasn’t yet recovered enough to beat faster, but it sort of stumbled happily, like a nearly-turned ankle averted at the last minute by the hand of a handsome man. Or a soldier waking with a broken fever. “And you pretended it wasn’t,” she needled fondly, resting her head on his shoulder.

He shook his head. “This is.”

She let the two tears well from some hot, incoherent core of her, didn’t hold back that tiny droplet of the insistent bubbling mess of her heart. Just this once. Jack must have felt them puddle on his skin, but he didn’t flinch. They’d backed away from each other so many times, but now, he didn’t flinch.

His lips brushed her hair. “Slightly different conversation, I suppose. When I pictured it.”

Blinking hard, she breathed in the earthy scent of him. “What would you like to talk about. Anything.”

She would tell him anything. All the raw edges of her unvarnished life. And she wanted to hear everything.

His arms slid around her, weighing her into the solid presence of him, so wonderfully big in her bed.

“We’ll come up with something sooner or later,” he murmured, smudging kiss after ardent kiss to her lips. “For now, I’d just like to listen to you breathe. Please. If that’s alright.”

Winding herself around him to better sample the taste of him, she murmured in response, “Well, Jack, I’ve no objections--but in order to do that, you’d have to leave off taking my breath away for a little while.”


End file.
